Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Family free after 5 years as captives
Afghan terror unit held parents, 3 kids
WASHINGTON — An American woman, her Canadian husband and their three young children have been released after years held captive by a group that has ties to the Taliban and is considered a terrorist organization by the United States, U.S. and Pakistani officials said Thursday.
U.S. officials said Pakistan secured the release of Caitlan Coleman of Stewartstown, Pa., and her husband, Canadian Joshua Boyle, who were abducted five years ago while traveling in Afghanistan and held by the Haqqani network.
Coleman was pregnant at the time, and gave birth to her three children while in captivity, officials said.
“Today they are free,” President Donald Trump said in a statement, crediting the U.S. government with securing the release “working in conjunction with the Government of Pakistan.”
Trump later praised Pakistan for its willingness to “do more to provide security in the region” and said the release suggests other “countries are starting to respect the United States of America once again.”
The Pakistani military said the family had been freed in “an intelligencebased operation by Pakistan troops” after they’d crossed the border from Afghanistan.
Boyle and the High Commissioner for Pakistan to Canada described a dramatic scene in which gunshots rang out as Boyle, his wife and their children were intercepted by Pakistani forces while being transported in the trunk of their captors’ car. Boyle told his parents there’d been a shootout and that the last words he’d heard from the kidnappers were “kill the hostage,” his father, Patrick, told The Toronto Star. Three intelligence officials said the confrontation happened near a road crossing in northwest Pakistan.
The high commissioner, Tariq Azim Khan, said, “We know there was a shootout and Pakistan commandos carried out an attack and rescued the hostages.”
The Pakistani military said early Thursday the family was “being repatriated to the country of their origin.”
But as of Thursday midday, the family’s precise whereabouts were unclear, and it was not immediately known when they would return to North America. The family was not in U.S. custody, though they were together in a safe, undisclosed location in Pakistan, according to a U.S. national security official, who wasn’t authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
A U.S. military official said that a military hostage team had flown to Pakistan Wednesday, prepared to fly the family out. The team did a preliminary health assessment of the family and had a transport plane ready to go. But sometime after daybreak there, as the family members were walking to the plane, Boyle said he did not want to board.
Another U.S. official said Boyle was nervous about being in “custody” given his background.
Boyle was once married to Zaynab Khadr, the older sister of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr and the daughter of a late senior al-Qaida financier. Her father, Ahmed Said Khadr, and the family stayed with Osama bin Laden briefly when Omar Khadr was a boy.
The Canadian-born Omar Khadr was 15 when he was captured by U.S. troops following a firefight at a suspected al-Qaida compound. He was taken to Guantanamo and ultimately charged with war crimes by a military commission. He pleaded guilty in 2010 to charges that included murder and was sentenced to eight years plus the time he had already spent in custody.
Several years ago, Zaynab Khadr and her mother upset many Canadians by expressing pro-al-Qaida views.
Officials had discounted any link between that background and Boyle’s capture, with one official describing it in 2014 as a “horrible coincidence.”
The couple has told U.S. officials they wanted to fly commercially to Canada, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about the situation.
The military official said the family is still in Pakistan during discussions about how and when they will leave, and said the U.S. is prepared to fly the family out if that is their choice.
The Toronto Star reported that Boyle spoke to his parents after his release. “Josh said he was doing pretty well for someone who has spent the last five years in an underground prison,” his father told the paper.
“We got to hear his voice. It was amazing. He told us how much his children were looking forward to meeting their grandparents,” his mother, Linda Boyle, said.
Coleman’s parents, Jim and Lyn Coleman, meanwhile, posted a statement on the door of their Pennsylvania home saying they appreciated “all the interest and concern being expressed at the joyful news that Caity, Josh and our grandchildren have been released after five long years of captivity.”
The couple set off in the summer 2012 for a journey that took them to Russia, the central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and then to Afghanistan. Coleman’s parents last heard from their son-in-law on Oct. 8, 2012, from an internet cafe in what Boyle described as an “unsafe” part of Afghanistan.
The only trace of the couple since had been videos released by their captors and family letters.
U.S. officials call the Haqqani group a terrorist organization and have targeted its leaders with drone strikes. But the group also operates like a criminal network. Unlike the Islamic State group, it does not typically execute Western hostages, preferring to ransom them for cash.